I continue to be impressed with Your Porter.
Your Porter is the automated messaging tool that I use to run all of my properties. There are a ton of different similar tools out there – SmartBNB, Guesty, Hostaway, and more. I’ve personally tested nearly all of them. In my opinion, none of them come close to Your Porter, and all of them are significantly more expensive.
I’ve been a Your Porter fan girl for years. When I started using them, they had a robust auto-messaging feature for Airbnb and Booking.com. They also supported auto-reviewing and auto-responses to inquiries on Airbnb, 2 things that can factor heavily into your search ranking on Airbnb.
Since then, they’ve constantly been improving.
Their first major improvement was income reports, a must-have for co-hosts managing other people’s properties. These allow you to create a monthly report of income earned from all channels, as well as the amount owed to your property owners.
Their next major improvement was a direct booking site. With just a few clicks, you can set up your own site where clients can book with you directly, without having to pay service fees to Airbnb, Booking, or any other channel.
And now, most recently, they’ve added an auto-snooze feature.
They just announced this on their blog a few weeks ago.
Airbnb will prioritize listings that have been recently updated in the search rankings. By allowing you to automatically snooze your listing(s) for ten minutes at a time and then turning them back on, you’ll force Airbnb to be constantly hard-refreshing your listing’s data, thus keeping you at the top of the searches. It’s a fantastic feature that adds a lot of value to an already amazing product. Now I don’t have to go in manually and tinker with my listings every day!
Although some channel managers / automated messaging services integrate with Homeaway, and Your Porter currently doesn’t, I’m told that integration is coming this summer. Most channel managers don’t offer income reporting. Almost none of them offer a direct booking site. And all of them cost significantly more than Your Porter (starting a $5 a month per listing).
This is seriously the best tool out there for hosts just starting out.